Wisdom from Microsoft's Bill Buxton

Yet again I've taken an unplanned and extended leave of absence from blogging. My work and travel schedule lately has been overwhelming, and after spending seven weeks on the road (not the entire week each week, but it's still been brutal) I'm finally back in the office and looking up to see that there is still a world around me.

One of the things I've done this morning is walk through my favorites, checking the news and so on. And on The Register there was an interesting article about Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research. And in that article was this great quote:

"The renaissance is over - the problems are far too difficult for any one individual to have sufficient knowledge to advance them. On the other hand, the renaissance team is possible and our only hope is the collective - the cross disciplinary team. Engineering and computer science, interaction design, ethnography, marketing and sales."

Now of course there are still opportunities for a talented lone software developer to make a big difference, but most "interesting" problems today need to be viewed from a broad range of contexts in order to be solved. This is something that I've thought for years (albeit on a much smaller scale, I'm sure) so it makes me happy to see that my views are shared by someone as brilliant as Mr. Buxton.